Theatre Nova Announces Plays in the Inaugural Michigan Playwrights' Festival

When Theatre Nova directors Carla Milarch and Dan Walker founded the playwrights' theatre last fall, they highly suspected that the wealth of talented Michigan playwrights they'd encountered needed more room to grow. In August of this year, as the Theatre Nova play reading committee combed through over 50 script submissions for the Michigan Playwrights Festival, their suspicions were confirmed. In fact, the number and quality of scripts that they received has led the group to add a second week to its staged reading festival, in order to provide more opportunities for Michigan's playwrights. In addition to the five new scripts and six 10-minute plays to be staged this December (the 8th through the 13th) Theatre Nova will add a second week in 2016 (date TBA) that will showcase an additional four full-length and six 10-minute plays. In total, 21 Michigan playwrights' works will be featured, in this unprecedented staging of exclusively Michigan-made new plays.

"It's such an exciting time for the arts in Michigan" Milarch says. "Because of the big changes in Detroit, and the incredible growth in Ann Arbor; for the first time in a long time, there's a sense that Michigan is actually a viable place to make a life as an artist, and that is showing up in the playwriting community too. I've been watching playwrights here for over a decade, and I'm seeing this incredible crop of new voices emerging. And new voices need new opportunities, which is where Theatre Nova comes in."

Playwrights included in the festival range from Michigan veteran Kim Carney, whose plays have been produced across the country and whose local hits span decades and include MOONGLOW, THE HOME TEAM, GEOFFREY AND JEFFREY, and THE WAR SINCE EVE at Performance Network; to Linda Ramsay-Detherage, whose work burst onto the scene a few years ago, winning the 2015 Wilde Award for best new script for her play SUGARHILL and garnering a recent nomination for the prestigious American Theatre Critics' Association Steinberg award, to Morgan Breon, an emerging playwright, whose short plays and monologues are making their way into the Detroit theatre scene.

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